The term well-developed countries refers primarily to the North America and Western Europe. But discussion of consumer behavior and consumption norms in these countries should also make reference to Australia, New Zea-land, and other nations with substantial populations of European origin such as Chile or South Africa.
Countries in North America and Europe reflect a distinct consumption ide-ology. Four main topics highlight the consumer behavior and consumption patterns in this coup of countries: consumer skills, recreational shopping, ex-periential consumption, and luxury fever.
Consumer skills – choice making, even for complex products such as phar-maceuticals, is a highly developed skill among consumers in North America and Western Europe. As a result, many consumers are extremely price and value conscious. Highly developed choice-making skills fuel the growth of retail discount chains and do-it-yourself outlets. Consumers are accustom-med to making fine distinctions between similar brand, and they are adept at detecting new uses for products offered by major manufacturers.
Many consumers in these nations develop sophisticated relationships with favored brands that endure and change over their life span (Fourier, 1997).
Recreational shopping – the role of shopping and purchasing has taken on dramatic new meaning in these countries. Ever since the invention of the department store in nineteenth-century France, there has been a growing trend toward recreational shopping. The modern, self-enclosed shopping
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mall in all its variant forms has become a site to which consumers make frequent pilgrimages to satisfy a wide variety of needs, including those for aesthetic enjoyment, problem solving, and personal display (Kozinets, 2002). These trends achieve expression in malls such as the West Edmon-ton Mall (Canada), theme parks such as Universal Studios, and themed re-tailers such as ESPN Zone where consumers may participate in both real and virtual sporting challenges. These retail environments combine, in a seamless whole, both shopping and entertainment. In addition, we see the phenomenal persistence of a wide variety of occasional market-places such as art and crafts shows, festivals, flea markets, swap meets, farmers’
markets, street vending, and garage sales where people buy, sell, socialize, and are entertained.
Experiential consumption – distinctive feature of North America and Euro-pean economies is the importance of leisure and tourist consumption. Af-ter a brief downturn following the events of September 11, 2001, adven-ture and ecotourism operators reported an upturn in bookings, returning the industry to the growth it had been experiencing throughout the 1990s (Stellin, 2002). Organized gambling is commonplace in Europe and North America as well. It has quietly become one of U.S. consumers’ favorite forms of entertainment, generating more revenue than movies, spectator sports, theme parks, cruise ships, and recorded music combined. Increas-ing importance of experiential consumption can be seen in many areas of life. Cities as diverse as Brisbane (Austria), Stockholm (Sweden) and San Antonio (USA), have been remodeled to provide intense touristic experi-ences along their central waterways. And experiential benefits rather than attributes and features are now the focus of advertising for many goods and services. Basing on the mentioned above we can say that it is a new marketing paradigm that focuses on providing consumers with high value and highly profitable experiences as the experience economy (Pine
& Gilmore, 1999). The Japanese and elite consumers in other cultures have swelled the ranks of world tourism in recent years, but North America and Europe have traditionally had large tourism markets. The motives that in-spire tourist consumption are diverse, ranging from nostalgic visits to his-toric towns and villages, to escapist entertainment at Mardi Grass, to ro-mance at a Club Med or on a cruise, to extraordinary adventures through African safaris, Himalayan trekking, or Outward Bound trips.
Luxury fever – some experts argue that luxury is experiencing an incredible boom (Frank, 2004). In 2004, luxury spending in USA was growing four times as rapidly as spending overall. There are long waiting lists for every-thing from premium wine via luxury cars and jets. Family size has gone down, but house square footage has gone up. The average American house at the beginning of XXI century was nearly twice as large as its counterpart from the 1950s. USA consumers eat fewer meals at home, but they do so on more elaborate cooking equipment. The United States is not the only econ-omy exhibiting luxury fever. For example, Japan, with fewer than half as many people as the United States, consumes over half of the USA volume of luxury goods. Countries in Europe and Asia and even Russia and other transitional economies appear to have big and growing appetites for luxu-ry goods. Luxuluxu-ry spending is a trend not just among the rich. It’s found among middle and lower-income earners as well. There is considerable ev-idence that in the USA and other countries consumers are spending beyond their means (Andersen & Ritter, 2008).
Some experts predict that a move out of the industrial age and into the in-formation age will alter culture and lifestyle in important ways. Some call it the era of fragmentation, or the culture of cub-cultures, where people can take a menu approach for their lifestyle, picking and choosing from day to day ac-cording to mood and current fashion. Because of advances in technology, mar-keters can cater to smaller and smaller niche segments, customizing goods and services to individual tastes. In some ways, the information age connects people with each other. In other ways, it leads to isolation. In the developed countries, consumers can interact with the world via interactive TVs and com-puters. Tens of millions of people around the world are connected to electron-ic bulletin boards, and this number is still growing. Cyberspace lifestyle have the potential to make centralized offices obsolete. More and more people are beginning to work at home. This trend may make home and neighborhood much more important in developed countries that they have been for the last several decades (Johansson, 2009). Incidentally, this trend also makes provi-sion of information, entertainment, and home shopping via the Internet and television growth industries.
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